About Me

Saturday, October 31, 2009

Jeezly pop. Just when you thought the Christers couldn't get anymore whack.

During Halloween, time-released curses are always loosed. A time-released curse is a period that has been set aside to release demonic activity and to ensnare souls in great measure ... During this period demons are assigned against those who participate in the rituals and festivities. These demons are automatically drawn to the fetishes that open doors for them to come into the lives of human beings. For example, most of the candy sold during this season has been dedicated and prayed over by witches.

I do not buy candy during the Halloween season. Curses are sent through the tricks and treats of the innocent whether they get it by going door to door or by purchasing it from the local grocery store. The demons cannot tell the difference.

The dryer broke two days ago. Of course we cannot buy a new one -- we can barely afford to get it repaired. We had to wait until today, when we got paid, to go to the laundromat, that's how stony broke we are these days. It is very sad.

Today, this morning, at dawn, we loaded up all the laundry, which was piles and piles of it, because the dryer has been breaking for days, and drove off to hunt down a laundromat (these are both scarcer and pricier than they used to be -- I will appall you later with tales of how much it costs to wash a load of laundry*). The kid had never been to a laundromat and was terrified, who knows why. I kept telling her she would love it.

"They have chairs," I said. "Nearby will be a small store to buy chips and crap. We can read and talk while the laundry spins. It will be warm and smell good and we can watch the interesting people. I got several of my best details for my best stories watching people at laundromats. You'll see."

I was right, too. She loved it.

"This is so cool," she told me, returning from a lengthy circuit of the laundry. "We should come here every week!"

(Herr Dr. Delagar, I must tell you, was much less sanguine.)

*I forgot to include this. $2.25 a load. But this is for the big machine, the front-load triple loader. The smaller machine was only $1.50. The dryers are a quarter for every 9 minutes.

Friday, October 30, 2009

This is the premise my SF world starts with: in about 2100, I say, America completely privatizes its prison systems (the real religion of America, as I frequently tell my students, being not Christianity but Capitalism).

This is an idea I have seen floated about on a few right-leaning economic blogs already; left-of-center bloggers responded with why it was a really stupid idea, which was that once you make something profitable, d'oh, people do more of it.

The commenters on the blogs, though, were who interested me. You can imagine the comments.

Anyway, I ran with that idea, especially since I had been reading half a dozen other books at the same time -- Billy Bragg, and Octavia Butler's work, and Adam Hochschild's Bury the Chains, and I forget the others. I didn't read Douglas Blackmon's Slavery By Another Name until later, but that book got folded into my research on the revision level.

Wednesday, October 28, 2009

So we're at the memorial service for the kid's uncle's father, and it's in Fayetteville, which is still a fairly small town. Herr Dr. Delagar and I lived there for about ten years about ten years ago. Everyone knows us, more or less, in certain parts of that community, specifically in the academic community, which is who was at this service, since the uncle's dad was at the university for, heavens, 30 years? Something like that.

So, well. We're doing the bit after the service, where we mingle and chat, and an older doctor of something inquires what I am doing now, and Herr Doctor Delagar tells him how I am teaching at U.A. Fort Smith and how I have a book coming out.

"Oh?" he asks. "What sort of book?"

"It's a novel," I tell him. "Science fiction."

He looks very much taken aback. Then, with the air of one striving to be kind, he tells me, "I hear that's very respectable now."

"It is," I agreed, doing my utter absolute best to sound calm: like I hadn't been working full-out the past eleven years for just this moment.

(We have no scale in our house, no one in our house ever goes on a diet, any discussion of food in our house has to do with recipes and what we like to eat, not with what we weigh or whether we're fat, I never, ever, ever, comment on anyone's weight, ever, we take walks because we like walking, we hike and such for the same reason, we don't keep crap in the house -- bad food I mean -- but that's because we don't eat bad food, it's nasty, not because we want to be skinny, blech, we have better things to do than fuss about who weighs what, when I was a kid growing up that was ALL that ANY girl every talking about, ALL girls were on diets, ALL girls were judged by their weight, ALL girls weighed themselves five and six times a day, and EVERY girl who weighed over the prescribed amount was WORTHLESS, I spent 90% of my adolescent years fretting about my weight, when I could have been -- shit, who knows, studying algebra? Learning Latin? Learning to write deathless prose? Hell if I know, because instead I memorized the # of calories in Oreos and carrots and mashed potatoes and tried like shit to weigh the "perfect" weight for my height, which would have, at long last, made me a real human being, instead of a valueless bit of filth, this was not happening to my child, no way, no how.)

Herr Dr. Delagar is trying to print his dissertation, to submit it to the graduate school archives, which is the last requirement before he's officially done with the PhD hoops.

Maddeningly, his evil computer has glitched on him (twice); then his printer wouldn't print; now he has run out of toner, which he did not discover until he had destroyed so much paper (of course the dissertation must be printed on %100 cotton bond) that now he has to go buy more extremely expensive paper, as well as another extremely expensive toner cartridge.

Sunday, October 25, 2009

Over at P.Z.'s place, he's got a post up about the -- I don't know what I'd call them: advertisements sort of sounds wrong to me, but okay, we'll call them that: ads for atheism being runs in NY city subways.

The post isn't really about the ads, which are fairly non-controversial (Put up by the Coalition for Reason, all they say is A Million New Yorkers are Good Without God -- Are you?). It's about that, oh, how shall we phrase this? That miseducated, overpaid Fox-news Republican-Welfare recipient, Sean Hannity, who, having heard about these ads -- I'm guessing someone sent him a link -- hopped around on TV fulminating, "Can you imagine? What if some Christian group ran pro-God ads in the subways? Can you imagine the outrage?"

Dude.

Apparently Sean has been living in a cave, I would respond, except, well, he and his ilk are always responding this way, aren't they? Almost everything they say makes it clear they don't live in the same reality as the rest of us. They live on planet Wing-Nut, Planet Xtian Loon-O-Sphere, where Obama is trying to take their guns, where there really is a War on Christmas (despite the huge decorations being put up in my public park as we speak, and the aisles and aisles full of Christmas crap that has been for sale in every store in Fuck Smith for a good week already), where White Christian Males are the truly persecuted people in America, where those huge signs on I-40 (COME ON OVER TO MY HOUSE BEFORE THE BIG GAME THIS SUNDAY -- GOD) do not exist and where, as PZ points out, the hundreds of different sects of Xtian advertising in the subways and every other public space -- why, not allowed! Just like no little Xtian boy or girl is allowed to pray over his school lunch or read the Bible at school! Because of the evil Lie-brals! Because we're the ones who hate! We're the ones who are truly intolerant! Not them!

Thursday, October 22, 2009

Le Guin is one of my top ten favorite writers on the planet. For a very long time, The Dispossessed was my favorite book -- that, and The Lathe of Heaven, and The Word for World Is Forest, and Always Coming Home...well, then there were her short stories. Brilliant short stories.

Then Octavia Butler showed up, and I had two favorites. And lately I have discovered Eleanor Arnason, so 3 favorites...but hey, this is an excellent problem to have.

In any case, Ursula Le Guin is not only 80 years old, she is still writing brilliant fiction.

streiff: I was an evaluator on a live fire exercise back in 84 when a herd of free range cattle moped into the impact area and about 200 troops decided they were much more fun to shoot at than 55-gal drums filled with dirt. I wish I had pictures of the outcome of that because that is what her photo op is like

Neil Stevens: Streiff: You aren’t comparing Dede with a cow are you? Because that wouldn’t be right.

streiff: actually, I was thinking of one particular cow that had a rear leg chopped off by an M-60 machinegun

…no, that image wasn’t pretty: then again, neither was this

Most people realize that everything these guys say about feminism is bullshit, but it never hurts to be reminded.

Oh, yes: and notice that these tools respect our troops just about as much as they respect women.

Monday, October 19, 2009

Maybe you heard about this ground-breaking study (pdf) which has found that since 1972 women have become progressively unhappier. See! See! the ant-feminist crowd is crowing. We told you so! Feminism is sooooo bad for the womens! Girls just want to stay home!

Except, of course, as Barbara Ehrenreich (among others who have looked at the study) points out in this column, well, no.

First, the "progressively unhappier" indications aren't that strong. White women are one point more likely to say they're unhappy in 2006 than white men in 2006, compared with the same groups in 1972 -- and, btw, this holds true for all groups of women/men. That is, stay-at-home moms vs working moms vs childfree women, etc. All equally happy/unhappy. So. Make of that what you will.

And: suicide has plummetted for women from 1972 to 2006, while staying stable for men, which, as Ehrenreich says, and as the study itself admits, would seem to be a more reliable measure of misery/unhappiness. Women were unhappy enough in 1972 that they were eating their guns. Not now. Isn't that a better measure of happiness than what box they tick off on a form?

And then there is this:

Another distracting little data point that no one, including the authors, seems to have much to say about is that while "women" have been getting marginally sadder, black women have been getting happier and happier. To quote the authors: "... happiness has trended quite strongly upward for both female and male African Americans. ... Indeed, the point estimates suggest that well-being may have risen more strongly for black women than for black men.

But you can see why, ah, certain groups and blogs are ignoring that data point. It's not like brown women are real people, is it?

Further: these are self-reported trends in happiness. That is, these surveys asked the women and men themselves how happy they were. Well, crap. There's this thing, see, called socialization. Women get socialized, and got socialized even more strongly back in the 1960-1970's than we do now, to claim to be happy even when we weren't.

I still remember my second grade teacher snapping at me in class, I mean just yelling at me, furiously, "Why don't you ever smile? Smile."

I need not tell you that she never said this to any little boys in class.

And what woman here has not been instructed, by some random man on the street, that we need to smile? Or scolded because we aren't smiling?

So: it's just barely possibly that the women in 1972, 1978, 1980, I'm just saying, were over-reporting their happiness; that women since then have become more able to report their actual feelings about how things are (kind of the way men do?) -- just maybe?

Sunday, October 18, 2009

I believe I had this exact same conversation with my mother when I was eleven:

The Kid: Please.

Me: I'm working! Is this important?

The Kid: But I need my waffle buttered...

Me: So butter it.

The Kid: But you butter things so much better than I do.

Me: And why do you think that is? Do you think I was born knowing how to butter waffles?

The Kid: It seems like you were. (Wheedling.) You do it so well.

Me: Buttering waffles is not an inborn skill.

(Here I make my crucial parenting error: I get up to butter the waffle.)

Me: (Still ranting): I can only butter waffles because I started buttering them when I was ten and between that age and this I have buttered eight million waffles. (I am now buttering her waffle, mind you.) What sort of parent would I be if I did not make you learn to butter your own waffle?

The Kid: (Smugly accepting her buttered waffle): One who does an awesome job of buttering waffles.

Saturday, October 17, 2009

This one from Punkass Blog -- you'll remember Franken's bill, asking for an anti-rape clause in gov't contracts, the one 30 Republican Senators voted against (cause they're both pro-life and pro-rape, these guys, which makes perfect sense, really, when you think about it) -- anyway, here's a clip from Jon Stewart dealing with it.

I am attending a stupid, er, I mean very useful workshop concerning why my department is not publishing more (could it be because we are spending all of our free time in workshops? Hmmm) and thus I will not be blogging this weekend.

Instead, I send you to Twisty, who with this post reminds me why I love her so much.

Uh-oh! In the self-twitpic, McCain has failed to completely disguise the fact that she has breasts. Her “tens of thousands of followers” retaliate for her public femaleness by loosing a torrent of abuse, a Public Shaming Action consistent with the Global Accords Governing Fair Use of Women.

Q. MANY REPORTERS HAVE ASKED WHY TELOMERES RESEARCH SEEMS TO ATTRACT SO MANY FEMALE INVESTIGATORS. WHAT’S YOUR ANSWER?

A. There’s nothing about the topic that attracts women. It’s probably more the founder effect. Women researchers were fostered early on by Joe Gall, and they got jobs around the country and they trained other women. I think there’s a slight bias of women to work for women because there’s still a slight cultural bias for men to help men. The derogatory term is the “old boys network.” It’s not that they are biased against women or want to hurt them. They just don’t think of them. And they often feel more comfortable promoting their male colleagues.

Thursday, October 15, 2009

So we're hanging out in the waiting room at our doctor's office this afternoon, the kid and me, and there's not much to read, basic Good Housekeeping journals and Hunting magazines, Dr. Phil is jabbing away on the TV, we're bored stiff. I pick up a bright primary-colored kiddy Bible and we begin reading it together solemnly.

We get to the Noah's Ark page and the kid's eyes widen.

The Kid: Mom...

Me: What?

The Kid: I just...it just occurred to me...

Me: What?

The Kid: If there were only two animals of each kind on the boat? And only Noah's family?

You'll remember our sweet Con Iggulden, he of The Dangerous Book For Boys, who insisted, along with half the (conservative)(and home-schooling) world that he was not a misogynistic sexist, that little boys were just different from girls, that was all, and in his vast experience as a teacher he had come to realize that modern day schooling and childrearing was destroying boys, trying to turning hearty tough little boys into girls, just because the feminists and nasty teachers liked it that way, and so on, et cetera, you've heard this song before.

I open one of the catalogs I used to buy Hanukkah presents for the kid from, because it had cool toys, puzzles and kits and art supplies, and what do I find? Yes, indeed. On one page, The Dangerous Chemistry Set For Boys.

A youthful error? Yes, perhaps.But he's been punished for this lapse--For decades exiled from LAHe knows, as he wakes up each day,He'll miss the movers and the shakers.He'll never get to see the Lakers.For just one old and small mischance,He has to live in Paris, France.He's suffered slurs and other stuff.Has he not suffered quite enough?How can these people get so riled?He only raped a single child.

Why make him into some Darth VaderFor sodomizing one eighth grader?This man is brilliant, that's for sure--Authentically, a film auteur.He gets awards that are his due.He knows important people, too--Important people just like us.And we know how to make a fuss.Celebrities would just be foolsTo play by little people's rules.So Roman's banner we unfurl.He only raped one little girl.

Perhaps an eccentric citizen has become convinced that the President is an alien from Mars, and the courts should order DNA testing to enforce the Constitution.

That's not made up. That's an actual Right-Wing Tea-bagger suing the U.S. Government, alleging that Obama is not eligible to be President, submitting stacks and stacks of reasons, and that is one of them.

Between this Birther nonsense and their obsession with what other people do with their sexual organs, can we please start ignoring the Right now, please? Please?

Tuesday, October 13, 2009

Monday, October 12, 2009

Bill Frist was on the Maher show Friday night, doing a better job that I expected, frankly. He did repeat that canard about America having the best health-care system in the world, however, which is probably true if you are a rich fuck like him.

I have done nearly all of those, including skipping filling prescription and skipping dosages: not for the kid, but for me; and I have done them more than once. I'd say, in fact, I have done them often. (To be fair, my meds are fucking pricey.)

I've also gone without going in for medical care, especially when I know a visit is likely to lead to something expensive.

We have insurance, but it doesn't cover everything; and I am still paying off doctors and dentists and specialists and for Herr Dr. Delagar's manifold medical issues...about $300 off the top of every paycheck goes for medical bills, which that's over and above what we pay for insurance.

Sunday, October 11, 2009

The weather was so excellent yesteray -- cold and windy and grey -- that I took Big Dog for a walk over to the field by what I call the creek and what is actually, of course, a storm drain. (The kid has gone to Branson with her BFF, so Herr Dr. Delagar and I are without child this weekend.)

It's the first long walk I've taken without the kid for sometime -- just me and the Big Dog, running and walking in the cold. The field, as it turned out, was all boggy with the recent rain, so we got a bit muddy, and Big Dog was disappointed that I would not take off the leash to let him run off into the trees after the possum he could tell were hiding up in the trees, but other than that, a fine time was had by all.

Saturday, October 10, 2009

Over here, Steve at Washington Post (read the comments, too, which are excellent) gives us a post on the conservative reaction to Obama's winning the Nobel Peace Prize, which, among other odd reactions, has been to insist that Reagan should have won it, or that George W. Bush should have won it (oh hell yeah, see because invading that country that was no threat to us and hadn't done a fucken thing see that counts as liberatin them ignorant savage Iraqis see and as for all that collateral damage which it weren't anywheres near 100,000 no matter what that fucken liberal media over there in England claims and them people still gettin shot and blown up over there and the women still gettin raped and all just shut up why do you hate America always talking about the bad things ain't you hear about the schools we painted and George W. LIBERaTED that country!!1!YEAH! course he should get the Nobel Peace Prize ahead a some appeasen N- uh Barry HUSSEIN Obama.)

Reagan of course should get it because he ended the cold war. And reduced the size of the government. And Star Wars. And entered the world into decades of prosperity.

The really bizarre bit is these tools actually believe all of that. But, as I have said before, they have been raised, all of them, in a culture that trains them to deny reality, to live in a false world, one their preachers and daddies tell them exists, not the one that is actually all around them, so it's not really all that bizarre, I suppose.

I keep having to struggle with it, just the same.

(While you're over at WP, see also this, which has been cracking me up all week. Conservapedia Christians get funnier and funnier -- though, as Livia in comments notes, it's an uneasy kind of funny, considering how dangerous some of them also are, with their habit of shooting doctors and blowing up federal buildings and so forth.)

(Here's Fred on the Conservapedia Christian's translation project. I love Slavktivist so much, mainly & especially for posts like this one, though his snark on the Left Behind books is also delicious.)

(Title of post corrected b/c, having been educated in Louisiana, I am an idiot.)

Thursday, October 08, 2009

Over at EoTW a fine post on the dearth of women in philosophy/women publishing in philosophy journals.

You'll remember a few months ago, a similar dust-up over why, why, why there are just no women writing decent SF...and of course there's RaceFail09, why, why, why aren't brown people writing SF...

And previously we have addressed the question of why, why, why aren't women writing manga, or comix, or going into the classics, or become engineers, and over and over people will claim, well, see, women just don't want to become engineers, brown people just don't want to write SF, no, no, they would much rather be nurses or housewives or clean bus stations, that's just how those people are.

Every time, guys (it's always guys, is it) appear to claim (1) if we changed things, it wouldn't be fair to the guys (2) I know a woman, and she says there's no problem -- in fact I'm married to her/related to her/fucking her, so why would I lie? (3) true there's lots of guys but probably that's b/c women don't want to be in this field anyway (dude, did you read the post?) and (4) where's your evidence that this is sexism? If women would just submit in larger numbers/try harder/stop whining....

Then, of course, some woman shows up and agrees with them. I don't want any help! I don't want guy pity! I want to pull myself up by my own bootstraps, by golly! I want the guys to love me! Because the system is too fair!

Why are women/people of color sick of this song? Why are we reluctant to play with on this field anymore? Why do you think?

Monday, October 05, 2009

October is absolutely my most favorite of all months out of the year, for just such a day as we are having today -- dark grey and chilly, and now, in the late afternoon, a steady sluice of cold rain. I am drinking coffee and reading Jean Webster's Daddy-Long-Legs for about the 10th time, wrapped in my favorite deep green thermal shirt, watching the weather and enjoying myself enormously.

I like February too, mind you, and grey icy days then; but February is on the downhill slide toward summer, and how I hate summer. October means winter is coming, months and months of dark and cold ahead: my sort of days, stacks of them, just like this one, all in a row.

Sunday, October 04, 2009

Everything is on the shelves -- well! All the shelves we currently have, which still leaves six boxes in the room where we keep the TV and the kid's bins of Legos and blocks. (She's not quite old enough to give up blocks, and Herr Dr. Delagar and she still go on Lego sprees, frequently.)

I've ordered two bookshelves from Etsy, which do you know about Etsy? Way cool site I have only just discovered. I ordered one of these and one which is gone because I must have ordered the last one. Now I'm waiting for them to arrive, but even when they do, we'll still have (I estimate) four boxes of books stacked along the TV room wall.

We're going to sell some, I think, to a store in town that buys used books; and donate some to the public library; and give some to TOLP's kids; and some to Zelda and Mouse, if they want them, and some to the students at our university. At the end of this process, I hope, I hope, we will be without books anywhere but on the shelves...oh, yeah, and the six crates in the closet. Um. Erm. Well.

But you should see how tidy the front room looks! Plus! I vacuumed everywhere (except the TV room) yesterday evening. Not just around things as I have been doing for about six months.

Which you can bet in public some on the Right will claim not all of them believe this, and sure, not all of them do, just like not every Republican is racist.

On the other hand, we've got all those "studies" they love to do, showing how "if only" women didn't have the vote (or brown people didn't, or those with more than 13 years of education didn't, et cetera et cetera), Republicans would have swept every election since 1940.

So what's that tell us, except that when they're alone in their manky little hearts, they think only people who believe exactly what they believe ought to have the franchise?

Update: Ha! Here's Myca, who said what I was trying to say, over at Alas, a Blog, earlier than I did and much better!